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Share on XAs the impending deprecation of third-party cookies looms closer, Contextual Targeting takes center stage, and nowhere is it more relevant than in Programmatic buying. In our webinar, Cutting to Contextual: Contextual Targeting in the Programmatic World, IAS discussed Contextual Targeting and how it can help drive stronger recall, favorability and ultimately a more positive user experience.
To continue the conversation, we’ve answered the top questions we received from participants.
How can publishers maintain control and ownership of contextual advertising?
The elimination of cookies presents opportunities to greatly increase the value of premium content. While first-party data will undoubtedly become the MVP as we move away from cookies, finding the right contextual solution to align with your buyers’ brand suitability needs is essential. We know that context matters — we have the research to back it up. Content is still king — publishers need to focus on crafting high quality content and leave the targeting woes to ad tech providers.
Publishers can win with data and granular insights into their audience, emotional and semantic page level analysis and real-time scoring that goes beyond keywords, URLs and standard brand safety content categories.
Going forward, will contextual targeting become more important than identity solutions?
Identity solutions remain a valuable source for targeting, even in a cookieless world. Still, the industry has a long way to go before developing a scalable, standardized solution for identity resolution. In the meantime, contextual targeting provides an immediate innovative solution that will continue to support targeting efforts as identity resolution evolves.
With cookies going away, what kind of new contextual solutions will be introduced in a cookieless world? How can we ensure these solutions don’t over-penalize premium or local news publishers?
Contextual targeting and avoidance solutions that leverage semantic technology and emotion classification are at the forefront of innovation in a cookieless word. Being able to target specific content environments and evaluate the real meaning of words on a given page will help advertisers not only reach their target audiences, but better evaluate safe and suitable spaces. This type of technology is especially important for protecting premium news content, as it helps advertisers appear alongside suitable content for their brands without ruling out entire topics or keywords.
Choosing the contextual adjacencies of digital ads based solely on keywords in the URL is a bit like trying to understand the full contents of a book based on its title alone. URL-based keyword protection doesn’t consider the full content on the page. For instance, words like shoot/shot/shooting show up regularly on keyword exclusion lists, but 76% of the content with these words is actually safe content unrelated to violence (e.g. a photo shoot, golf shot, shooting a movie). Relying on keywords for brand suitability means you could potentially miss out on safe and premium content like sports coverage or lifestyle content. Contextual suitability can help you identify these ideal opportunities to connect with your consumers that your competitors might be missing.
Is all contextual targeting created equal in terms of brand safety? What things should advertisers look for in a contextual solution?
While ensuring brand safety is critical to maintaining a positive brand image, contextual targeting takes strategy a step further and allows brands to reach their desired audiences in the right environment, at the right time, without relying on third-party cookies. IAS’s Context Control solution offers the most sophisticated contextual targeting capabilities that go beyond keyword or URL based targeting. We use Natural Language Processing to analyze content at the page level, taking semantics, sentiment, and emotion into account in order to accurately classify a page.
How do you identify important contextual categories for programmatic buys?
With over 300 contextual segments available for both targeting and avoidance today, IAS is constantly evaluating market trends and feedback in order to meet all of our clients’ unique needs. We offer industry vertical, topical, seasonal, and audience proxy off-the-shelf segments that were all built based on client feedback and we welcome additional suggestions to add to our extensive catalog of segments available today.
